Anatomy

Neuroscience

Biology

Sensory system

Dorsum

Reward system

Machine learning

Cognitive psychology

Artificial intelligence

Psychology

Mean squared prediction error

Nucleus accumbens

Ventral striatum

Stimulus (psychology)

Striatum

Computer science

Probabilistic logic

Dopamine

Brain stimulation reward

Journal of Neurophysiology

To investigate how the striatum integrates sensory information with reward information for behavioral guidance, we recorded single-unit activity in the dorsal striatum of head-fixed rats participating in a probabilistic Pavlovian conditioning task with auditory conditioned stimuli (CSs) in which reward probability was fixed for each CS but parametrically varied across CSs. We found that the activity of many neurons was linearly correlated with the reward probability indicated by the CSs. The recorded neurons could be classified according to their firing patterns into functional subtypes coding reward probability in different forms such as stimulus value, reward expectation, and reward prediction error. These results suggest that several functional subgroups of dorsal striatal neurons represent different kinds of information formed through extensive prior exposure to CS-reward contingencies.

Discrete coding of stimulus value, reward expectation, and reward prediction error in the dorsal striatum